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The urban oasis boasts about 170,000 different types of microbes, recent dirt samples show. That diversity is comparable to a tropical rain forest. About 2,000 species are found only in the park.

1. Vanishing Rest StopsFor the past fifty-three years, rest areas have offered weary travelers a place to pull off and pause and maybe even learn a little…

American chestnuts once made up a quarter of all the forest between Maine and Georgia. Animals depended on the tree for its fruit and humans used the wood. But at the beginning of the last century, a blight wiped out almost all of the chestnut trees. A few survive, including one specimen in upstate New York. The family that planted that tree 27 years ago enjoys its blooms each year at this time.

This week, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended lowering the legal limit of blood alcohol content for drivers to .05 or even lower. Currently, it's illegal to drive in all states with a BAC of .08 or higher. Host Scott Simon speaks with Dr. Anthony Liguori of Wake Forest School of Medicine about alcohol's impact on driving ability.

Wreaths are made from greens collected by "tippers," who snip about 14 or 15 inches off the limbs of fir trees. But Christmas wreaths are valuable enough to attract tree poachers, who cut limbs and even whole trees on private land. That means the wreath on your front door could contain stolen goods.

The specter of drought is often raised in these early days of summer. And for good reason, though water levels have returned to normal around the New…

Many of us see weeds as a pest, but nature writer Richard Mabey prefers to think of them as "vegetable guerrillas" and "forest outlaws." Mabey stands up for the incredibly adaptable and disreputable plants in his new book, Weeds.

Firefighters struggled on Sunday to contain wildfires raging out of control in France and Spain as Europe wilts under an unusually extreme heat wave.

Chinese author Cixin Liu caps his Hugo Award-winning Remembrance of Earth's Past series with an intricately structured, immensely complex tale of a rocket scientist caught in a human-alien conflict.

John Vaillant's Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World was awarded Britain's leading nonfiction book prize on Thursday in London.